The Delaware layoffs occurred just last Friday, where 12 engineers and maintenance technicians were let go. According to Fisker, it's currently only able to keep a small maintenance team at the plant to maintain and watch over it.

"We have always had a flexible business model that allows us to scale up and down as work demands," said Russell Datz, Fisker spokesman. "As we ramp up the project again, we will add a new headcount. We've accomplished a lot at the plant, using more than 40 local contract firms to recycle old material and equipment. The plant is now ready for the next phase of installing new production equipment."

However, one of Fisker's laid-off employees described the Delaware Fisker plant as "absolutely empty."

Jeffrey Garland, a former aide for Sen. Bill Roth (R-Del.) who took charge of community affairs and business development for Fisker in Delaware, was one of the employees laid off last week. He said Fisker had hauled away used equipment, but didn't install the equipment required to build the $47,000 Atlantic hybrid sedan, which is Fisker's second electric-hybrid car. This vehicle was supposed to start production later this year, but has been put on hold due to financial issues with the government.

Fisker Atlantic

"All of us who were there hoped we were still adding value," said Garland. "I think what happened was the budget numbers are so tight right now and they're working so hard to preserve as much cash as they can that something had to give. We're not making a car in Wilmington right now, so given that situation, it was an obvious place to make a cut."

The last year hasn't been too kind to Fisker. Last May, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) blocked its loans previously provided to the automaker in 2010. Fisker had received a total of $529 million where $169 million went toward Fisker's $102,000 Karma plug-in engineering and another $359 million went toward the Nina midsize sedan. The DOE has blocked those loans for nearly a year now, and Fisker has been looking for alternatives to DOE funding in the meantime.

The automaker, which entered Delaware in 2009, had received $21.5 million in grants and loans from the state and has collected about $18 million of it so far to keep the idle factory maintained.

Funded by a federal research group that develops technologies that the government has interest in.

Federal research should lead to a product. One that the government uses. And even better is when it can be commercialized so that PRIVATE businesses can take it and market it creating new industries. This is what happened with the internet.

Perhaps you should actually read what I said. Research is fine. But the government is not an investor capitol group. They didn't pay for all the companies out there to build their datacenters and such.

"Federal research should lead to a product. One that the government uses."

That kind of logic would imply that an agency like NASA (or even NOAA) is completely useless, as a lot of what they do is basic research. The products are usually the side effects of this kind of basic research.DARPA wasn't created to develop specific technologies either. It was a response to the perceived threat of Soviet technical achievements right after Sputnik. It was basically the government giving a lot of people a lot of money and saying do something interesting. Which is exactly what you're advocating against.

NASA research towards things used in outer space is what made things like the internet possible. I'll say a lot of NASA research today is largely useless. Instead of, oh I don't know GOING INTO SPACE!, they're studying the climate and such. Thanks liberals.

While the old Cold War is over (now we have a new one that the current administration refuses to acknowledge), DARPA's purpose remains to try and research and develop technologies the government has an interest in for military purposes. Typically those technologies, like any, eventually wind up having a commercial version.

Studying climate is important. A lot of the satellites that NASA sent up will provide data for how hurricanes and tornadoes form/progress, and the human impact of those in the US is immense. They could well have disproved global warming, and to a degree they have: A lot of the more outlandish claims or projections have been proven false, much to the dismay of the most extreme environmentalists.

If the surface temperature record proved to be a crock of manipulated BS, then they would have uncovered it. It turns out that there's a very good correlation, much to the dismay of AGW deniers.

With DARPA, many applications have commercial use, but many more don't. Even with successful grants where the researchers achieve the goals set out, most results are never used even by the military. What they're doing is probing new technologies.

You can call them stabs in the dark, but they are a big part of what's made the US economy so powerful in the last 50 years if not longer. The reason is that the misses are a tiny fraction of GDP, and the DOE grants are no different. $16B in loans over 4 years is around 0.03% of GDP, 1% of total auto related GDP. They've ensured that the US leads EV research and production by a huge margin. Just raising the white flag and letting China and their subsidies snatch that market is bad policy.

That's only if we accept the premise that the climate never naturally changes, and that ANY increase in temps must be caused by man. We know for a fact the climate of Earth has never been in a state of permanence historically, and that it changes from long warming to long cooling cycles. Correlation is NOT causation. CO2 is NOT a "driver" of atmospheric temperature. The "hockey stick" was a fraud that's been exposed.

quote: You can call them stabs in the dark, but they are a big part of what's made the US economy so powerful in the last 50 years if not longer. The reason is that the misses are a tiny fraction of GDP, and the DOE grants are no different. $16B in loans over 4 years is around 0.03% of GDP, 1% of total auto related GDP. They've ensured that the US leads EV research and production by a huge margin. Just raising the white flag and letting China and their subsidies snatch that market is bad policy.

There IS no significant market for EV's. Not even in Europe, which has had horribly high prices on fuel for decades, has a concerted effort to develop and market EV technology been made. If EV's were going to be anywhere by now, they would surely be there in force. What makes you people think EV's are so important here, or even feasible for the needs of the population?